Watching the debate on it right now. Horgan's game for a fight, but I don't think he's got the right answers people need to hear. Wilkinson's just pushing this "Project Fear" thing - a combination of distortion, scare-tactics, and deliberately confusing the voters. Let's call them near-lies.
I am definitely in favour of getting rid of First Past The Post.
People here may be used to it, but they don't know what a shitty system it actually is compared to what else is out there.
FPTP is designed to assume there are only two possible political choices. It actively works against having more choice than that.
We already see that it results in total polarization, and extreme partisanship becomes the rule. There is not incentive for a politician to do anything but the most dirty campaigning style, because the objective is to take your minority of votes and leverage it into absolute power.
Does FPTP produce governments that the majority of voters actually supported ? No. Do the legislation they produce and the policies they make have that stamp of legitimacy, that most people are actually in favour of it rather than against? No. Do the local MP's or MLA's get to actually claim the majority of their own communities chose them as representatives? In most cases, they get in by being a larger minority than the other minorities.
Most votes under FPTP are wasted - your vote comes to nothing. Most governments rule by projecting their 35% or so of the vote into a majority of seats, and absolute power.
Many voters are stuck voting strategically, against the party they don't want instead of the party that they would really rather choose because they believe in it.
Really that is what FPTP is designed for: for one party to rule ALONE, no matter if the majority of voters did not choose to support it.
If you take notice of those lobbyists who are against Proportional Representation, what they all have in common is the belief that a minority ruling over the majority (instead of having to answer to it), is what they want.
The thing about ProRep is:
- The parties get only as much power as they actually deserve. What could be wrong with that?
- You get more political choice. Never mind that FPTP strategic voting shit, and no more unjustified pressure to just choose from 1 of 2 political options. Choose what you actually believe in, and your vote actually counts.
I'm going to shout out some basic principles here, and then explain how it relates to this Electoral Reform issue:
VOTING IS NOT A GAME, IT IS ABOUT VOTERS CHOOSING WHO REPRESENTS THEM.
DEMOCRACY MEANS GOVERNMENTS HAVE TO BE ACCOUNTABLE TO THE PEOPLE.
GOVERNMENTS MUST HAVE LEGITIMACY IN ORDER TO RULE.
People (the media especially) call FPTP a "horse-race" or otherwise treat politics like a sport, where the contest is a sort of entertainment, winning is the only issue that matters, and there's some prize for being the champ. Nope. It's is about representing your local community or region, and combined, having a legislature that accurately represents what the people actually wanted to govern them. If you can't say that you really represent your community, or that the government people end up with is actually the one they wanted, then you have no legitimacy there. Having the "consent to govern" from the voters is the core of democracy, and elections are all about obtaining it.
Yes, every political contest has winners and losers, but the real test is: do people really accept the result? Obviously not everyone gets what they wanted, but if they see that most of their community (Local or overall) actually wanted it, they are willing to accept it happening. Proportional achieves this; FPTP usually doesn't.
With FPTP: Each of 81 or 338 (or whatever number) individual races take place, and the winner of each one could have won with 75% of the vote, but also maybe just 30 % of the vote - as long as he or she has 1 vote more than their nearest opponent. That's not exactly a real standard of whether the community does or doesn't want you governing on their behalf. Add up all these small contests and you get a result - usually a majority of seats going to a political party that never even managed to get a majority of the peoples' support. A legislative "false majority" is built, where seats are counted not votes, no matter how narrow of fragmented the "victory" is, it's considered absolute. As soon as the resulting government tries to do something, it's probably going to be over the objections of most of the people who voted. Why does it seem like most governments act like assholes? Because that's the way the system is - they end up ramming their ideological agenda down most peoples' throats, knowing that if they actually had to get support from the majority of people, they'd be fucked. FPTP has trained our politicians to act like spoiled brats: sharing power is not seen as desirable of they can leverage a tiny advantage in votes into absolute power and the ability to rule alone.
Proportion Representation is different:
The power each party has is much closer to the support they actually got. Governments (premier and cabinet ministers) are formed, and get to rule because they have a majority of voters who support them. Sure, maybe that's not all one party, but of the people wanted just one party in charge, than most of them would have chosen that. More realistically, the parties have to grow up and work with enough other parties that they can say they have most of the voters behind them. This isn't some kumbaya-singing bullshit; these fuckers belong to us, and they should not rule unless they can get at least most of us on their side. Nobody gets everything they want? Fine, as long as you're not sticking most people with what they don't want!
People bring up the stability issue, but the past few decades have proved that FPTP is not any more stable. If fractures things according to region, much of the time; some areas get a treat, while others get ignored. And FPTP produces a fucked up sort of polarizing politics that really blow up and chance of stability if no party can get a majority of seats (something which is increasingly common, despite FPTP distorting the results to force this outcome). How to negotiate a minority government after you've burned all your bridges already? Like I said before, these clowns are trained to only imagine themselves in power alone, with no obstacles to doing what they want. Proportional governments are just as stable, and much more fair - people see the election outcome as legitimate, and it's up to their parties to figure out a way to move forward from there. Though this does depend on the rules of a legislature, many places with PR have rules that parties cannot just "blow up" a government for a new election, if there's some other alternative deal that can be found.
As for the issue of "fringers", with PR, there are minimum thresholds for getting into the legislature at all. No weird-ass micro parties get very far. FPTP actually has more potential for weirdos; all you have to do is take over one riding nomination battle in a "safe" seat for one mainsteam party, and you're in there. Frankly, if a new party grows its support to the point where many people vote for it, and it routinely challenges for seats, then it's not "fringe" anymore.
As for the issue of "extremists" much the same principle applies. Under PR, a small band of hardliners might form a party and get a minor presence in the legislature, but if they're horrible, they can be excluded easily from holding power so long as the bigger parties can swallow their own pride and not make any "deal with the devil" to keep out their mainstream rivals. Again, with PR parties also have the inventive to not make bitter enemies of everyone else. If you want to grow beyond a nugget-sized party, you still have to convince people to support your views. For extremists, First Past The Post is actually the best system, because it gives extremists the chance to do the thing they always want: gain absolute power. FPTP means the extremists do not need majority support or anywhere near it to take many more seats, take power alone, and tyrannize the majority who never supported them.
Bottom line: FPTP is for those who crave absolute unchecked power as a minority opinion, instead of ever having to convince most people to go their way. Proportional guarantees that you have to have real majority support in order to hold power.
Got it, folks ?
